Using technology to protect privacy

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Data mining raises fears about the loss of privacy. But officials at the Center for Democracy and Technology have identified three approaches to designing data-mining projects that can protect personal information held in government and commercial databases. They are:

Make databases anonymous by encrypting first and last names to prevent unnecessary and potentially harmful disclosure of personal information.

Build permission rules into the databases and database queries to control access to personal information.

Use the databases to create audit trails that cannot be altered by someone trying to hide evidence of privacy abuses.